A Floating Crap Game For Losers

Two things are wrong with canoes. You can`t get into them and you can`t get out of them. Other than that, they are instruments of torture.

Canoes may look like innocent fun, but they will maim you on purpose. Never trust a canoe. Just when you think a canoe is your friend, it will turn on you.

Canoes do not belong in water, they belong in rodeos. All canoes should have clowns in barrels to push them around so they won`t hurt you.

No one should ever get into a canoe who isn`t a muskrat or a Mohican.

A canoe is the Indian`s revenge on us, a time bomb passed down to damage guiltless generations of immigrants.

You can`t get there from here in a canoe unless you carry it. Canoes love to be carried. They make it easy to be carried and trick you into thinking they will be as cooperative in the water.

Canoes look very sporty on top of a station wagon and identify you as a nature lover and an idiot.

You can rent canoes but you can never own one. Canoes defy ownership the way cats do. Cats are neater.

Most boats have a captain. Canoes only have victims.

Canoes never go where you point them. They love to go into trees and into other canoes. If you let one around swimmers it will never miss a submerged head.

Some day someone, even a member of your own family, will talk you into canoeing. Maybe at a forest preserve or, worse, Wisconsin.

Warm weather makes jerks of us all. We feel an obligation to get back to nature. Why we do this is a mystery, since nature has been blowing up our coats all winter without an invitation.

But a lot of us still think camping and hiking and inspecting the sweet face of summer is a human duty, and there we are, sleeping on the ground with animals we would poison if they came to our house. And we try to sneak into their daytime world in silent canoes. Canoes are on their side.

You can hire a canoe and slip upstream and maybe even get a Polaroid of a deer, which you can then compare to the one you took at the zoo and you will not be able to tell the difference.

Canoes are supposed to know the way. They have been there hundreds of times, and still they get lost. They duck into side streams and come to dead ends and blame you by tipping over.

When you first get into a canoe, someone will hold it for you. You are attempting suicide, and you have your own doorman.

You should remember that no one will be holding the canoe for you once you get to the Wild Kingdom.

It is difficult to step into a canoe from dry land when the canoe is right side up. It is impossible to step into one when it is face down

--laughing so you can`t see it--and you have nothing to stand on but water.

Every river or lake has a bottom, and the bottom is closer to your feet near the shore than it is in the middle. Canoes know this, but they will stay out in the middle forever if you let them.

You have to drag a canoe with you because it won`t come by itself. It would probably go home by itself if you turned it loose, but even a canoe becomes a companion when you realize you have intruded into the home of irritable reptiles and who knows what other scaly, invisible terrors.

The trick is not to panic. You might find that the bottom of the river is the consistency of pancake syrup and by standing on it you threaten to become a fossil fuel.

But the alternative is to explain yourself to an approaching snake or snapping turtle who may be investigating your dilemma.

You will find that you can turn the canoe over, but it will scoop up water like a bucket. Canoes can still float with lots of water in them, though you lose the crease in your pants if you try to ride one that way.

Good grooming must take second place to survival. When you finally flop belly down in the canoe, leaving one sneaker behind forever as a souvenir of your foolishness, the canoe will seem less like a coffin and more like a cradle.

Every canoe has to prove who is boss. The rest of the journey can proceed.

Don`t try to observe the scenery, which is why you are there. Don`t be fooled by the benign resignation of the canoe.

Get the thing back to port as quickly as possible, haul it up to shore and make fondue sticks out of it.